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Lessee, right now there's about four different gold generators in the Cash Shop. Or RIGs where yeah, you *might* win an item, but don't hold your breath, so that counts as a gold generator.

Besides what they do to the economy, which has been written about and ranted about and complained about and entirely too much time spent on in posts in Site Feedback and GCD and other forums that are cheerfully ignored by the Gaian Powers That Be, I have my own personal list of why I dislike these things so much.

1. They're boring. Look, you KNOW what you're going to get - gold. The only question is what number they show you and how much they increase your gold counter. Text numbers are boring - and I say that as a numbers person. You don't even get the joy of seeing a little crudely recolored item icon show up on your screen and in your inventory. Just a text number. *yawn*

2. They're lazy. Just change the max number and the distribution number (how the grants are distributed along the continuum from the highly unlikely maximum grant to the far more likely minimum grant), get some unpaid summer intern to scribble some new "art" with their brand new Crayolas that they probably had to pay for out of their own pocket because Gaia is run by a bunch of cheap bastards, and voila, a "new" gold generator.

Or, the tldr version: all the gold generators are the same.

At least with item/choice generators, someone has to think about what to put in it, what might entice people to separate from their hard earned or at least brain dead earned Gaia Cash, what hasn't been used in awhile, etc. They have to come up with 100 items, and maybe even get those unpaid interns to color in a new "recolor".

But gold generators? Lazy.

3. We don't need any more gold. Once people have been here long enough, they generally have enough gold (or items from way back when they can sell for gold) to get almost everything they want. Why would someone spend GC on gold they don't need when they could spend it directly on items they actually want?

4. We need something to spend gold on. Yeah, there's a bunch of overpriced "recolors" in Loyal's shop. Whoop-ti-do. Nothing new, nothing exciting, and the recoloring was done by those same unpaid interns, probably the junior ones. The new bunny slippers don't even have contrasting colors in the centers of their ears, which was part of what made the real bunny slippers so charming. I'm not a graphic artist and even I know that's not difficult. More Gaian laziness.

Don't even look closely at the Ivory Violeztin. I like unicorns, but I don't want that disaster anywhere near my avatar. (Whoever made that mess puts the "K" in "Kwality".)

5. Gold generators stop appealing to players once they've achieved their goals. They only way that gold generators are going to keep making gobs of money is an influx of new players - which I can see that Gaia is desperately trying to create with the whole, amazingly generous, will set you up for life on Gaia 5M bonus per head they're paying now for referrals. When it actually works. (Note: that was sarcasm, in case you missed it.)

I have been skimming the GCD a bit lately, and I'm seeing a trend of "Naaah, don't want to pay (X) amount for (Foo), I'm good with what I got." Inflation only works so far, then players get tired of it.